How much land the panels take

A megawatt is a unit of power, about what a thousand homes draw at once. A field of panels usually takes about four to seven acres for each megawatt, roughly two to three hectares. That is land you can walk across, and in Duneport it is a pasture someone grazes.

Rooftops are different. They use space a building already occupies, so they add almost no land. A field above town does.

At world scale the fear is bigger than the area. Studies that imagine all electricity from ground panels land on an area about the size of Poland: tens of millions of hectares, around half a percent to one percent of the planet’s land. Farms already use about half of all habitable land.

Duneport is not the world, and the last pasture is one field. Both facts are true at once. Count the acres. Then ask what the cheap hours are for.

The tempting mistake is to believe panels take more land than farming, or that the land question settles the drink question.

That is what lets you ask what cheap power can make.